What Marechera deals with in TBI are issues that have been prematurely solved in terms of a resigned attitude and pragmatic acceptance within many spheres of otherwise advanced society. What is the real value of social darwinism, and doesn't it undermine the very basis for humanity's enjoyment of itself? Isn't it better to stay, "shut up in one's head" than to compete in this fashion? What is the role of the intellectual within a society that is either metaphorically or literally at war? Indeed what is and isn't "civilised" about fighting? Marechera seems to be identifying with political liberalism in TBI -- but also explicitly accepts a conservative valuation that intellectuality is a form of sickness or a "plague". In this, he is a person of his time and place. This outlook appears to reproduce in part a colonial perspective which sees “sickly” liberals as opposed to the forceful warriors of society by virtue of their own weak natures. Whilst Marechera accepts this dichotomy as a useful general delineation for the parties – insiders versus outsiders – in the book , he in fact perceives things from the point of view of the sickly “insider” and thus reverses to some degree the force of this right wing value judgment. His questions are culturally conditioned but deeply humanistic, for they seek to discover what the meaning of society ought to be for those who are intellectual and accepting of dissent.
The Splash Award
- Jennifer F. Armstrong
- This blog has various purposes, the greatest one being that it is a database for my notes towards my PhD. I'm the international patron for Revolutionary Youth Movement of Zimbabwe. I'm studying the works of Dambudzo Marechera. I'm married to Mike. Generally I train too hard, but not as much as I would like to. I spend many hours of my life sparring at Cobra Martial Arts. Please note that my site often involves satire and parody. As a very wise person once said, it is extremely difficult to satirise the ideas of the extreme right, since their ideas already come across as self-parody. Nonetheless, I must persist in trying.
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2 comments:
Yes - it's paradoxical - critical but from the inside, and also from what in dependency theory would be called a "margin" (a colony/ex-colony) ... so, marginal and central at once. HMMMM I can see these things but the full rumination is too long for a blog comment.
I would suggest that a large part of what makes this book seem so difficult are the cultural inflexions derived from the colony, as one of its members encounters the scope of Modernism from his alien cultural perspective.
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